This week on Field Notes, we're talking about career paths. We've broken this conversation down into four questions. We'll dive into a different question each day this week. Today, it is all about where you want to be. What is the next thing for you and your career? What do you need in order to get there? How do you know this is right?
We've gone into the archives for this one. In this Field Notes post, originally shared in November 2013, NAS Director, Sunny Widmann, shares the importance of considering your goals and where you want to be. … [Read more...]

This week on Field Notes, we're talking about career paths. We've broken this conversation down into five steps. We'll dive into a different step each day this week. Today, we're focusing on the importance (or lack there of) in having or thinking about a career path.
What makes a successful arts leader? This is perhaps the most important question as you think about your own career path in the arts. What does success look like for you? What do you need to get there? Everyone will have their own definition. As an executive search consultant … [Read more...]

NAS produces publications, videos and other management tools to inspire those working in the field to take a fresh look at their work and the challenges they face. Over the last few years we have amassed quite a large catalog of content. We’ve sent NAS staff members into the archives to pick their favorites and share them here. This week NAS’ President & CEO, Gail Crider, shares one of her favorite NAS videos.
Brian Kennedy, Executive Director of the Toledo Museum of Art speaks about the book Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for … [Read more...]

We’ve just wrapped our first Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) Leading Innovation in Arts and Culture. This unique course was created by Dave Owens at Vanderbilt University and customized for the arts and culture sector by National Arts Strategies. This eight-week course, offered on the Coursera platform, brought more than 9,000 artists, arts administrators and cultural entrepreneurs from around the world together to discuss the specific constraints to creating good ideas in our field and to build strategies for successful innovation. This … [Read more...]

In this excerpt from "The Case for Cultural Fluency," Mikel Ellcessor introduces the concept of Cultural Fluency as it can be applied by arts and culture leaders. You can read and download his full white paper here.
It’s déjà vu all over again.
Picture this: you are in a meeting and you have been in this meeting many times. After another detailed mapping of the problem, someone takes a stab at a solution and says it:
“We have to move beyond the current audience and into new audiences and communities.”
This feels like success, right? … [Read more...]

Many great thinkers in our field have discussed the complexity of talent development and succession planning in the cultural sector. Marc Vogl, who works with arts and culture organizations in his role as Principal of Vogl Consulting, aptly describes the problem as a clogged and leaky pipeline. Basically, there are a small number of leadership positions at the top, often held for many years by the same people (that’s the clogged part) and therefore more junior employees are stuck at their current level, growing increasingly tired of waiting … [Read more...]

Editor’s note: Over the next two weeks, we’ll feature posts around the final convening of our Chief Executive Program, The Summit at Sundance. We invite you to participate in an online discussion of four major issues facing the cultural field. In this post, Alorie Clark introduces the second problem statement.
Governance is a certainly a hot topic for the nonprofit sector. Many organizations are finding that the traditional governance model isn’t working so well, sometimes leading to more stress than success. When considering all that … [Read more...]

As an emerging leader, it can be difficult finding a nonprofit board to join. I am full of passion, curiosity, hunger and drive, but figuring out the right organization in which to invest this energy can be challenging. Having taken the board and governance elective during my graduate school program, I am now interested in turning theoretical knowledge into practical experience. With an ultimate goal of becoming an executive director, I hope to start gaining governance experience as soon as possible.
How do you begin to search for nonprofit … [Read more...]

Working in the arts can be extremely stressful. Coordinating exhibits, performances and openings takes much work, organization and cooperation. Personally, I love controlled chaos of starting a new run, but I know how mentally taxing it can be. As an emerging leader, I have not yet encountered mental burn out from working in the arts. I also manage to maintain a pretty good work/life balance. However, I have participated in and overheard conversations with many senior leaders about the challenges of maintaining balance while holding high-demand … [Read more...]

Hearing about how our colleagues in the field address challenges can be extremely motivating and energizing. But sometimes, it’s hard to see how the steps one organization took can be translated to our own work. There’s no carbon copy solution to the issues facing the field but we can certainly benefit from understanding others’ experiences. What’s important is to find the key lessons that emerge from an experience rather than focus on the how-to of a particular example. At NAS, we love digging into stories from the field to find these learning … [Read more...]

The experience of being in a place for five days with an amazingly diverse and talented group of individuals through the Salzburg Global Forum for Young Cultural Leaders has left me completely changed. I have to admit that all the conversations that took place floated and tumbled around my head when I was there, and I kept struggling with what this meant for me in my day-to-day reality. As an arts administrator working with education and community partnerships, and specifically advocating for engagement with the most at-risk, I tried to flesh … [Read more...]

Watch the following video in which Yudhishthir Raj Isar, professor of Cultural Policy Studies at The American University of Paris and a faculty member of the Salzburg Global Forum for Young Cultural Leaders, talks about the responsibility that arts and culture organizations have to provide cultural translation.
Add your voice to the discussion. Use the comments below to weigh in with your thoughts on the effects of globalization on the cultural sector.
… [Read more...]

Watch the following video in which Mulenga Kapwepwe, Chairperson of the National Arts Council of Zambia and a faculty member of the Salzburg Global Forum for Young Cultural Leaders, suggests that arts leaders are best equipped to shape the future.
Add your voice to the discussion. Use the comments below to weigh in with your thoughts on the role of an arts leader.
… [Read more...]

Do nonprofit cultural organizations have a particular responsibility to reach into and represent all parts of the community? Does the benefit of nonprofit status require us to take more risks than commercial theatre? A recent article explores the Minneapolis community’s reaction to the lack of diversity in a local theatre’s upcoming season. While this piece focuses on the choices of one artistic director, other leaders in the field have also argued that not all organizations should feel obligated to be diverse. On the other hand, leadership … [Read more...]

A short research publication about how leaders influence the implementation of strategic initiatives and the value of alignment between multiple layers of leaders.
Research has confirmed that leader behavior influences group and organizational behavior, but we know less about how senior leaders ensure that group and organizational members implement their decisions. Most organizations have multiple layers of leaders, implying that any single leader does not lead in isolation. We focused on how the consistency of leadership effectiveness across … [Read more...]

About Field Notes

Field Notes is a means of amplifying and widening the conversations the NAS team has with leaders in the field and experts outside the field. The entire staff will contribute our observations and insights and share a commitment to providing something useful, useable. We see our job here as mining, distilling and contextualizing ideas; providing the morals of these stories, the frameworks that anyone can use; and offering everyone in the field the opportunity to discuss the underlying issues.